Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

Does an angel contemplate my fate?

So Battlestar Galactica, the “best sci-fi show ever” is ended.

BIG SPOILERS FOLLOW!

REALLY, DON’T READ IF YOU WANT TO REMAIN IN THE DARK!!

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!!

And it turns out it wasn’t sci-fi at all, it was Stairway to Earth.

That’s less dramatic reveal, more punch in the face and a cry of ‘ha, fooled you!’

To write a bad finale is one thing, to write a finale so bad that it reotractively invalidates an entire series is nothing short of evil genius. It’s like the last episode of Doctor Who revealing that the entire series was the drug-induced dream of a giant space whelk.

I lay awake most of the night, seething. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so betrayed and insulted by a writer in my life.

I was looking forward to a DVD rewatch of the whole show from start to finish, enjoying watching the clues fall into place knowing how they pan out, marvelling at Ron Moore’s cleverness in wrapping it all up so brilliantly.

But the clues didn’t pan out and there was no brilliant wrap up, because it was all God’s doing.

Great. Thanks for that, Ron.

I won’t bother with the rewatch, because the knowledge of the finale would be festering in me, ruining it.

It leads to a wider question of whether religion and sci-fi can ever co-exist.

Sci-fi can be used to examine issues of faith, which is what I’d always assumed BSG was doing. And it can even flirt with ill defined clues of divinity, as The Sparrow and Children of God did so brilliantly. Sci-fi can be agnostic, in fact it could be argued that it has to be. But for my money, explicit religious faith and science-fiction are antithetical.

Having angels and God explicitly directing events renders Battlestar Galactica little more than a grittier version of Battlefield Earth.

Comment

1. The problem I had wasn’t the religion, per se, it was the lazy plotting – of which the ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ stuff was just a symptom.
   
   You had people suddenly deciding to kill themselves; hands flopping onto Nuke Go Boom switches at the most convenient possible moment; characters suddenly realizing that the ending made no sense at all unless they got rid of the technology … a course of action that makes no sense at all; characters literally suddenly vanishing when the plot required it.
   
   You can mix religion and science fiction – either monomyth stuff like Star Wars, mystic visionary stuff like PKD or just straight down the line Christian allegory, like Out of the Silent Planet. His Dark Materials is science fiction about God.
   
   The problem isn’t God, it’s that writers have been using the gods as a shortcut to end their stuff since before the creationists think the world started. Dei ex machina look lazy, now, they feel like cheating.
   — Steve Sollin    Mar 25, 12:14pm    #
2. “Dei ex machina” Nice :-)
   
   I’m currently discussion the whole sci-fi/religion thing with various people on various fora. I’ll collate it all into a blog post when I’m done, but essentially, I agree with you.
   
   I agree Cavil’s suicide was out of character, but apparently it was Dean Stockwell’s decision – in the shooting script he was killed by Tigh.
   
   I quite liked the randomness of the Racetrack hand of God moment – I don’t mind a bit of left-field happenstance every now and then – until it turned out to literally be the hand of God, then I got annoyed.
   — Scott Andrews    Mar 25, 12:31pm    #

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